March 2016

March 31, 2016

When one is not a real artist the way I am not, one tends to do derivative work. In my defense though, in the past couple of years I have developed a certain style of my own, which is not to say it is a good style or a bad style but a style. The work above titled ‘My Village’ is so obviously derivative. It has been prompted by Vincent van Gogh’s 1890 masterpiece ‘Farms near Auvers’. With some effort I could have imitated some of his strokes and there are some that show that but instead I have just chosen the way his brush might flow.

You have to remember that all my works are entirely done on my PC or laptop using my mouse and a digital app called Fresh Paint. I am sure with some effort I can use actual brushes, paints and canvases. So far I have restricted myself to digital painting because I have gotten into the rhythm of it.

I can say with considerable certainty that I will not become a real artist in this lifetime but in so much as it allows me to escape the more dreadful aspects of real life, what I do feels adequate even if it is so utterly derivative.

March 30, 2016

In these columns I have written about my wish for the rise of a new type of human species which is not necessarily more powerful but someone who has evolved just about enough to have shed some annoyances. Among the annoyances that I have mentioned are the need to shave or the need to discharge bodily waste or fart or sweat or belch. In a particularly erudite question I have often asked this: What is the need for the asshole?

I think the way to this new human type is already being opened up by the rise of technology of all kinds, in particular the currently emerging virtual reality devices and content. I believe a branch of a new human type is already evolving consisting of those of us who are able to adapt to the ongoing technology-human fusion. If you watch gamers play various games, you realize that what is unfolding right in front of us is the early example of this new human.

Watching Facebook’s new virtual reality (VR) device Oculus Rift, I got this strange sensation that a separation from the old to the new human type has already been set in motion—those who can handle sophisticated devices and those who cannot. Every new device has a learning curve now, including new television remotes. Right at this point the new type of human might ask, “Television? Remotes? What are those?”

Couple VR toys such as Oculus with Microsoft’s remarkable new Holoportation technology that is a version of teleportation in a holographic sense and you begin to see the contours of this new human. All truly great technology is necessarily so seamless and intuitive that even the dumbest among us can operate but that may no longer be the case with such dramatic advances. There will be an increasingly steep learning curve that will force a separation between the old and the new and eventually lead to the rise of a new human type. By its very nature it will discriminate against age because older people like me will find it hard to keep up and finally give up. I am not saying it is a good thing or a bad thing but merely pointing out the inevitability of this separation.

Oculus Rift seems like an excitingly immersive home VR experience but at its heart it is also isolating because it straps its users with goggles and other gear that offer hitherto only gaming entertainment. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg insists that the eventual objective is to create the next generation computing and communication platform. I take him at his word for the sake of convenience. However, in order to take that leap Facebook and others who are getting into the VR enterprise will take the gaming route to first make a lot of money.

Priced $599 Oculus Rift is not for everyone. That price tag alone is enough to ensure that it creates a new variety of technological haves and have nots. I cannot complain too much about that because the world is divided among the haves and have nots at far more fundamental and essential levels such as access to clean drinking water. But that is not the theme of this short piece.

This technological separation will not necessarily lead to a better human type but merely a more technologically efficient one. For me though the original wish for a new human type spared the ignominy of discharging malodorous human waste still remains a burning wish. Or for that matter even having to fart or sweat or belch. Let’s get rid of those first.

March 29, 2016

March 28, 2016

For the first 35 years of my life I was both an avid cricket player and watcher. Over the last 20 years I have drifted away from the game but has not missed on its remarkable evolution.

There was a time in my teens when a team scoring 100 runs before the lunch break in a five-day Test match was considered audacious and even revolutionary. People used to gasp at any team scoring those many runs before lunch. From there the game has evolved into T20, a version where a single player would score 82 runs in 51 balls. In terms of the number overs it would be about eight and half overs which would take about half an hour at an average rate of three minutes per over. The idea that cricket has evolved from a team barely managing score 100 before lunch in dozens of overs to a place where a single player can score nearly that much in one fourth the time is extraordinary.

I was watching the highlights of Virat Kohli’s blistering 82 runs against Australia in 51 balls in the ongoing T20 World Cup and was struck by how we have Darwinian evolution happening right before our eyes. Kohli’s stroke-play was so seamless that one could not tell where his hands ended and bat began. In my growing-up days the only Indian player who had the swashbuckling demeanor that came somewhat close to today’s T20 was Farokh Engineer but he stood out because he did so against against a generally sedate lot.

We have sub-evolutions happening everywhere around us. When you see the younger generations—and by that I means five and above—take to electronic devices like fish to water you are looking at sub-evolutions unfolding right before your eyes. These are subtle changes to Homo Sapiens that we do not readily notice. I do.

For instance, watching Kohli or for that matter any accomplished young cricketer these days one gets the sense that one is looking at a whole new species of cricketers compared to the 1960s, 70s, 80s and even 90s. Of course, there have always been exceptions such as the iconic Donald Bradman or Vivian Richards but by and large batsmen of those eras were of a certain unhurried, studied variety. They were truly great cricketers but they now seem like a different species.

The whole body language of players such as Kohli is very different. There is that natural self-assurance that when they swing the bat it will be hit the ball nine out of ten times and hit precisely and brilliantly. Of course given the mood of the game there are many unintended and unplanned shots but they go with the territory. By and large one sees stroke-play that was not even conceived of in the older times.

There is a sense of urgency to get it done that players such as Kohli display that was so glaringly missing in earlier times. That is a consequence of players adapting to the changing format of the game. It is not surprising that many of these players find it hard to deal with a far more languid pace of Test cricket.

I must admit to having been thoroughly entertained watching the highlights but I am not sure one is entertained enough to return to the game with the avidness of my younger days.

March 27, 2016

In my nearly five years of obsessively looking at the works of great artists, there is perhaps none other who matches the disturbingly brilliant draughtsman in Egon Schiele (12 June 1890 – 31 October 1918, pronounced Ee gon Shila.) This Austrian artist, who was a protégé of Gustav Klimt, had a short life of barely 28 years during which he produces some 260 works.

Schiele’s representation of the human anatomy is captivating in a very raw, almost brutal sort of way. At the same time though there are works that illustrate his innate artistic genius. Apart from Vincent van Gogh, Schiele is the current sovereign of my artistic world.

That he lived for only 28 years and probably had about a decade or so real productive life shows his utterly concentrated genius. Schiele would not immediately strike you as a happy and tender painter but he has produced several works that have both those qualities. I have reproduced some of them here. Take for instance, his 1913 work ‘Mother and daughter’. There is so much warmth to their hug. Or even the 1908 work ‘Standing Girl’ where the girl is so meditative.

Schiele is better known as someone who captured raw sexuality with such force that people would first look at his works, turn away and then look at them again with some self-assurance. Schiele became highly controversial because his works were so contrary and in some ways affront to European figure painting. Given his preternatural draughtsmanship his works were so sharply defined and yet so evocative. His anatomical representation were not meant to be clinically accurate and yet they seem so real, particularly the way he drew hands in an elongated fashion.

Schiele is the first artist whose works I find so free-flowing and yet so utterly controlled. One can almost see the artist behind the art when you look at his lines. I have given here several examples and it has been very hard for me not to reproduce everything that there is on Google Art Project.

His commissioned portraits were as arresting as what he did own volition. He gives you the feeling that there was nothing that he couldn’t do. Take for instance, this lovely postcard that he designed in 1909. It is a measure of his astonishingly diverse genius that the man who did this postcard also painted Self-seer II Death and Man in 1911. Look at the close-up of the hand from that work. That’s what I mean by both being in complete control and yet so free.

Postcard 1909

Self-seer II, Death and Man, 1911

Two women embracing 1915

Seated male nude (self-portrait) 1910

1914

Sunset 1913

Mother and daughter 1913

Moa 1911

Standing Girl, 1908-1909

His famous self-portrait, 1912

Apart from van Gogh, Schiele is perhaps the only one whom I find flawless when it comes to presenting his vision of the world. Look at the color combination in his 1911 work Moa or his own famous self-portrait of 1912. That is an artist who is supremely aware of his gifts. Whatever he did—erotic, deathly, portraiture, nature—had that quality of an artist who knew his abilities so well.

March 26, 2016

Life is a loop where experiences keep returning after a specific passage of time. For instance, since yesterday I have been watching the 1953 Hindi movie ‘Footpath’ nearly two and a half years after I first started to watch it. There are several reasons why I am drawn to this movie, one of which is its crisply written dialogue by Zia Sarhady, who also directed the film. The lines have the lilt of the language that characterized many Hindi movies from this period. That could be attributed to the fact that many writers had serious literature as their primary calling but took to writing the movies because of the good money it paid.

For me part of the draw of the film is that it is about a hard-up journalist, forever battling penury, who finally takes to the life of crime. He achieves considerable success as a black marketer but the inner journalist in him is still aflame. So he makes a proposition to his former publisher-editor that he would write exposes about the underworld under a pseudonym. There have been other Hindi movies about journalists but not very many that capture the conflict between the missionary idealism of the profession of yore and harrowing survival challenges. ‘Footpath’ is reasonably successful in doing so even though its scale is rather modest.

Sarhady attempted to give ‘Footpath’ a touch of film noir and succeeded partially in some scenes. The protagonist, Noshu Sharma, played by Dilip Kumar, is torn between his innate idealism and acquired cynicism.

As I finish watching the film today after a gap of two and half years when I first began watching it in November, 2013, I republish my original post .

Footpath by MC

First came the song ‘Sham-e-gham ki kasam’, sung by Talat Mehmood, written by Majrooh Sultanpuri and composed by Khayyam from the 1953 film ‘Footpath’. The whim to watch the film, written and directed by Zia Sarhady, at 6 in the morning followed immediately after that. I write this post while watching it 60 years after it was made.

By a strange coincidence, the film is about Noshu Sharma (the great Dilip Kumar), a journalist battling his life’s chronic impoverishment. It is a state of affairs I am intimately familiar with. He works for a newspaper called ‘Dharti’ (Earth) whose editor Ghoshbabu seems like an old fashioned journalist. Let me just say it is not the kind of newspaper that Jeff Bezos would invest $250 million in.

The film’s early parts, which I have seen so far, have thick clouds of melancholia that rain defeatism on its characters despite Dilip Kumar’s sanguine optimism.

Penury haunts the opening scenes. For instances, there is a conversation about it between Dilip Kumar and the editor where the editor complains about not having money. To which Noshu says: “Gabhrane ki baat nahi hai, Ghoshbabu. Paisa jab nahi aata to nahi aata magar jab aane lagta to aane hi lagta hai,” (Do not despair Mr. Ghosh. When money eludes it really eludes. But when it starts flowing, it does not stop). So far for me, the “Money eludes” part has been prophetic.

In another scene Meena Kumari, playing Mala, also down and out on her luck, tells her son at dusk “Raat bahut lambi malum hoti hai. Jitni sotey main kat jaye utna hi achhchha hoga. (It seems like a long night. Whatever we can pass sleeping off would be better).”

And finally in a scene soon after that, Noshu’s elder brother tells a neighbor, “Din raat akhbar ke liye mehnat karta hai magar char char mahiney damdi us ke haath nahi aati. (He works day and night for his newspaper but does not get paid a farthing for four months at a time).”

In short, so far into the movie, life sucks. I am not risking any gratuitous spoilers here in a 60-year-old film by revealing that Noshu does take to the life of crime. Perhaps there are some pointers for career options for me and others of my ilk here.

The song that triggered this post is also melancholic where Noshu wallows in his loneliness on a sorrowful evening.

March 25, 2016

News is perishable within a short cycle but it can be resurrected after a reasonable passage of time. This morning I saw a widely published story about David Headley, the convicted key plotter behind the November 26, 2008, Mumbai terror attacks, drawn from his video testimony to an Indian court.

The story has Headley saying during a cross examination how he had hated India since his childhood ever since its 1971 war with Pakistan when the former had bombed his school on December 9. As news stories go, this is compelling because of a ten-year-old boy harboring a hatred for close to 40 years and acting on it.

This is where the bit about news being perishable within a short cycle and how it can be resurrected after a reasonable passage of time comes in. This is not a new disclosure by Headley at all. During his first appearance as part of his testimony in a Chicago court in January, 2013 Headley had said precisely that. I covered that trial and here is a passage from a report I filed for the IANS wire then: “The sentence provided a powerful denouement to one of the more unusual careers in global terrorism, of a man of obvious intelligence choosing relatively late in life to pursue jihadi objectives through unabashedly violent means. What began as childhood anger at his school being bombed during the 1971 India-Pakistan war eventually led Headley, once known as Daood Gilani, to be trained by the virulently anti-India terrorist group LeT (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba). Between February, 2002 and December, 2003 Headley underwent a total of over eight months of LeT training on the merits of waging jihad, use of weapons and grenades, close combat tactics, survival skills and counter-surveillance.”

Even the bit of news about former Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani visiting the Headley family after the death of the latter’s father soon after the 2008 Mumbai attacks is being reported as a “new twist.” The fact is that that too was disclosed during the Chicago hearing.

I am not surprised that this happens because we live in such information-saturated times that news is forever perishing as does our memory along with it. People do not remember things for too long. Communal memory is no longer transmitted from generation to generation because it is no longer held in the human brain to the extent it used to be before the advent of the Internet. Retaining collective memory is now farmed out to the incredibly powerful servers of companies such as Google. I can say with fair certainty that in the three years since Headley first made that disclosure about hating India because his school was bombed most had already forgotten what he had said, if they knew at all in the first place.

What this means is that news is not when something happens but when you discover that something has happened irrespective of when it might have actually happened. As an experiment, what if someone reported tomorrow morning that Mohandas Gandhi has been assassinated? Don’t be surprised if you find some people who would be genuinely surprised and horrified as if they were hearing it for the first time.

March 24, 2016

When I wake up every morning, do I create the universe around me from my cache memory? Is the immediate observable universe around me just an approximation quickly constructed by my brain from cache memory?

I am tempted to believe that we perpetually create a new universe. While the broad structural contours of the observable, physical universe may remain as they are, we do fill in new details. There are, of course, larger features and experiences that are common to a group of people in a particular area such as weather but even there, if you observe minutely, they are felt or experienced differently by each individual.

My default temperament is to think along these themes on a daily basis until interrupted by the vagaries of mundane life. I am fascinated by the fact that we live such finely individualized lives even though we intuitively think that we are unified in the way we go through a common experience. I like the idea that I will never really know what another person is really thinking. I can only have an approximate idea which by its very nature not entirely accurate.

On April 19, 2014 I wrote a post about life being a shared approximation. That theme fits here rather neatly:

Breaking dawn and falling dusk* are such lovely ways of experiencing Earth’s rotation. Dawn and dusk and everything else in terms of the way sunlight changes its appearance is specific to a celestial body in this particular solar system; Earth, in our case. There are hundreds of billions of solar systems, which may or may not be anything like ours, with their own versions of day and night. Of course, there is no sunrise or sunset in space the way we define them because they are both experiences unique to the shape, distance and rotation of any body in the universe relative to the brightest object in its vicinity. Notwithstanding this knowledge, it is always a glorious experience what we earthlings with quaint inaccuracy call sunrise and sunset. I say inaccuracy because there is really nothing rising or setting other than from our vantage points in the solar system relative to the sun, the brightest object in our vicinity.

Being an early riser (again a misnomer because I don’t know what early riser really means in the grand cosmic scheme) I routinely experience our sky getting ever so subtly illuminated. It is like a cosmic brush of photons sweeping over our horizon from mauve to orange to yellow to finally just white glare. As the dusk falls, the order of the colors of sunlight seems to be reversed from white to yellow to orange to mauve. Once again, this experience is specific and unique to Earth simply because each celestial body will have its own combination of different hues depending on the constitution of its atmosphere, it axis, its position in relation to the sun and so on. For instance, the lunar sky looks mostly black because there is no atmosphere to give it the kind of breathtaking resplendence that we experience everyday.

Inevitably, all such experiences bring me back to the lifelong realization that reality depends entirely on who you are and where you are. I can only approximately guess whether your reality is the same as or even largely similar to mine. It certainly feels so intuitively when it comes to larger realities such as sunrise or sunset within reasonably geographical proximity. We must all be conscious that there is no overarching reality that is common to us all. It is determined by so many other factors. The best we can do is to look for shared approximation. If all this sounds strange, you may blame it on the occasional dizziness that Earth’s rotation of about 1700 km per hour relative to its axis causes in me. We forget that that’s how fast we all move at any given moment. We do not feel it because it is a constant movement. We are forever getting flung but since that is built into us we do not seem to be discomforted by it.

While watching a 2002 movie ‘Copenhagen’ featuring Niels Bohr (played Stephen Rea) and Werner Heisenberg (Daniel Craig) I was struck by the idea of the universe being a series of approximations again. The movie is a speculative idea about what might have transpired between Bohr and Heisenberg when they met in 1941 in the midst of the Second World War and both Germany and America developing their atomic bomb program. How the until then abstract atomic physics became the source of the immense destructive power of the atomic bomb also plays into their purported conversation.

I am conscious that I am jumping themes here and creating a disjointed post. But that is how one’s mind works sometimes. That probably explains why each one of us creates and carries our own unique universe every waking hour even as we feel that the overarching reality remains the same for everyone. The movie ‘Copenhagen’ is very engaging if you are into how humanity’s morality was split apart by the advent of atomic physics. It was ironic that the idealist Bohr ended up being on the side that eventually created the atomic bomb and actually used it on humanity, while Heisenberg the pragmatist ended up deliberately or otherwise thwarting the Nazi atomic program.

March 23, 2016

A painting without a frame tends to lose some of its seriousness. On the other hand, even an ordinary painting acquires some artistic weight with the right frame. I think it has to do with marking a territory. See below the same two paintings I just finished without frames. I personally like them both with and without the frames but the popular preference is for framed artworks.

It is as if frames lend paintings a context the way clothes do us. All great works of art have striking frames around them. Of course, there are different opinions about framing artworks with one school of thought saying that it unpardonable to frame any real great work of art in an ostentatious frame with intricate woodwork around it. It is almost as if the frame is being accorded the importance matching the painting. But then there are those who say as a subtle adornment it is necessary that the frame does justice to the painting without being too overbearing.

I am told Vincent van Gogh was not particularly in favor of ornate frames. He was known to have painted at least one frame himself for one of his works. Since all my artworks are virtual, I have the luxury of giving them any number of virtual frames. Some day when I use actual paint and actual brush and actual canvas I will think of an actual frame.

March 22, 2016

It is not surprising that there exists a group called “Indian Americans for Trump 2016”. It is also not surprising that Dr. Sudhir Parikh, a prominent Indian American doctor, was until today chair of fundraising and advisory committee of that group formed in January.

While ending his association with the group Dr. Parikh, who also owns Parikh Worldwide Media publishing house, has been quoted by the IANS wire as saying, "I allowed myself to be identified with that group because some members of the group are friends of mine.” He said, “I wish to clarify that I no longer belong to the group and I do not support the candidacy of Mr. Donald Trump.”

As they say, sense can strike anytime and anyone and that is always good.

One can fairly deduce that some supporters of Trump among the Indian American community gravitate toward the real estate billionaire because they feel a weird affinity for his unvarnished political posturing, especially his insistence on keeping all non-American Muslims out of the country for the time being. Of course, for many Indian American supporters of the Republican Party, the draw often tends to be its deep antipathy against the country’s tax laws as well as this ridiculous idea of minimum government. While many Republicans are still reluctant to call Trump as one of their own, in so much as he reflects many of the party’s versions of policies on such issues he remains attractive for a segment of successful and insular Indian Americans.

I would not say this with any verifiable certainty but more often than not segments of the Indian American community do feel culturally closer to white Americans. Because of their financial and professional success they feel increasingly invested in the conservative establishment such as it is. The pro-Trump Indian Americans say he represents the “best hope for America”, whatever that is supposed to mean in specific terms for the community.

At least, part of the support could stem for many Indian Americans complete identification with the right wing ideology as encapsulated by an amalgamation of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other extended members of the Hindu right. They are naturally attracted to the idea of the strongman leader that Trump has positioned him to be.

Successful Indian Americans such as Dr. Parikh have always hedged their political bets supporting candidates rather than parties. While anecdotally the community does tend to prefer the Democratic Party, the support for the Republicans is not insignificant. The existence of two unabashedly right wing Republican Governors in Nikki Haley (South Carolina) and Bobby Jindal (Louisiana) is not an accident.

It is not clear why someone like Dr. Parikh has withdrawn from the pro-Trump group. He has not said anything explicitly. As recently as ten days ago he was quoted by Brajesh Upadhyay of BBC Urdu as saying, "He (Trump) looks unstoppable. Part of our community does support Hillary Clinton, but we have to support the other side too, so that our interests are protected and we have access to the Washington power.” He also described Trump as a “doer who can negotiate both with Republicans and Democrats.”

Considering that the Indian American community does not have the voting heft to sway the electoral outcome in any significant way at all, eventually such groups do not make a major difference. What they do do is dilute perceptions of Trump’s virulent aggressiveness somewhat. Ironically, that may not be the intentions of such groups in the first place because it is precisely his aggressive approach toward certain issues such as jihadi terrorism that attract them to begin with.

In his conversation with BBC Urdu Dr. Parikh had clarified that the pro-Trump group did not represent Hindus despite the fact that many pro-Hindu groups have thrown their weight behind it. "Maybe they like what he has said about Muslims but that would be one of the reasons, not the only reason," he told BBC Urdu.